Whatta fortnight, folks. My dissertation got submitted. Tor had his 15-month doctor's visit. Lars's dissertation got submitted. Tor had his first emergency room visit. I cringe to think what will happen to the poor kid when we actually graduate.
I present you with the stats:
Height: 30.5", 29th percentile
Head circumference: 45.6 cm, 10th percentile
Weight: 21 lbs 7 oz, 10th percentile
Immunizations: pneumococcal, varicella (chicken pox), DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis)
Note that for the first time ever, Tor's weight has peeked into the double-digit percentiles! This discovery pleased us greatly, because our family motto is "Fat and Happy." (To better facilitate fatness, the kid is also getting his two-year molars.)
The list of words keeps growing. "Mas" (Spanish for "more") and "pelota" (Spanish for "ball") are tied for second-most-common utterance, still lagging behind the ubiquitous "UP" (which Lars capaciously translates as, "I want a change in my situation"). He notices every bus and yells, "BUH!" When rejecting a suggested activity, or when offered an offending food, the boy says, "No," and shakes his head. "Yeah" has morphed into "yup" as Tor mastered the /p/ phoneme required for "pelota."
Once we figured out what he was saying, we walked him down to Walgreens and bought every pelota in the place.
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| "But wait--what if I throw la pelota de futbol at la pelota major??" |
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| Picking up the slack after Atlas shrugged |
Tor wouldn't be Tor, though, if he focused on a single activity for very long. He kicked a ball under the bookshelf and you could see the gears shifting: "Dude, there are BOOKS here!"
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| "What shall I make for dinner?" |
The chair storage compartment on our compact dining set has also titillated him of late.
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| Open. (Not pictured: Closed.) |
The magnetic farm, a Christmas gift from cousins Molly, John, Sophia, and Nolan, has always been popular. But it's taken on a new luster as Tor gets a handle on its intended use: inserting animal halves into a hole and triggering a song about the Frankensteinian creation. (More rarely, he selects matching halves.)
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| "A cow-duck?! *moo moo* *quack quack* That's silly!" = dimple-worthy lyricism |
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| And he spent the rest of the day smelling like Lars's hockey gear |
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| The fireproof box is also Torproof--so far |
The story of Tor's ER visit sounds mundane in retrospect, but I assure you it was highly stressful for all involved. When Tor took a tumble on the sidewalk outside out house, he cut his lip and tore part of his left pinky fingernail off, as well as generally mangling the fingertip. We wanted to have it looked at to make sure he wasn't likely to have permanent nail bed damage that would cause his fingernail to grow back deformed, so we took him to the children's emergency room at a nearby hospital. (I'm happy to report that the place was deserted.)
The doctor checked him out, a nurse cleaned him up, and he got discharged within twenty minutes, richer one Matchbox car. He crashed on the ride home after briefly chatting with Grandma, so we brought him inside to sleep off the stress. When he awoke, he was his happy self. We took special care with the finger until it healed (which took about a week), including letting Tor wash his hands in a finger bowl rather than wiping them off on a washcloth.
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| "Feels wrong to enjoy this without my bath friends" |
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| Explaining the physics of the bubble raft |
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| Injured affront upon being asked to display his owie... |
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| ...but he'll do it for DaDa. |
Finally, Lars and Tor made my 30th very special. Thanks, you two!
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| "What a good boy am I!" |
We look forward to visits from Grandma and Grandpa, Oma and Opa, and my Mormor on Thursday. Stay tuned for photos.
